Society, land, love or money: A strategic model of how to glue the generations together

Abstract

Abstract : The purpose of this paper is to show that if reasonable care is taken in well-defining the types of games of strategy which arise naturally from considerations of the multigenerational aspects of any society, then many different plausible explanations of intergenerational links will all be consistent with an ongoing economy with intergenerational transfers of wealth. Given that the problem is stated and deemed to be important what can we do about it? In this paper we proceed by developing (in highly simplified form) the apparatus needed to consider a multistage variable person game of strategy. This is applied to several relatively simple examples involving conscious altruism, coded or instinctive behavior, the threat of social custom and the role of ownership. In conclusion, it is argued that although the examples analyzed are simple they are examples of general phenomena. The level of mathematical analysis itself is kept as a minimum. Further development calls for a considerable enlargement of notation and further discussion of items such as information, games with infinite horizons and the many problems associable with the development of adequate solution theories for games played in extensive form. As the stress is upon the modeling problems of glueing the generations together, the game theory is presented only as a useful method for furthering this purpose. Because it stresses the general concepts of strategic analysis it is our belief that it is particularly suited to the analysis of situations in which economic, social, political and other decisions and motivations must be considered together.